Thousands of Kurds from across Europe traveled to the suburbs of Paris Tuesday for the politically charged funerals of three people killed in the December attack in the French capital.
Buses were hired to bring people from France and several neighboring countries to the ceremony in Villiers-le-Bel, north of Paris, local sources said.
Tears and cries “The Martyrs live forever!” greeted the coffin, wrapped in the flag of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Kurdish-controlled Rojava region in northern Syria.
Crowds followed the funeral on a giant screen set up in the car park, showing a wreath-surrounded casket beneath a portrait of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.
Police and security volunteers were on duty outside the hall rented for Tuesday’s event.
A xenophobic gunman, William Malet, killed two men and a woman in a December 23 attack at the Ahmet Kaya community center in the 10th arrondissement of Paris.
The victims were Abdurrahman Kizil, singer and political refugee Mir Perwer and Emine Kara, leader of the Kurdish Women’s Movement in France.
Arrested after the shooting and officially charged on December 26, 69-year-old Malet told investigators he had a “pathological” hatred for foreigners and wanted to “kill migrants”, the prosecutor said.
Don’t trust Turkey
Malet, a retired train driver, has a violent criminal history and has just left custody over a previous incident.
But many Kurds in France’s 150,000-strong community do not believe they acted alone, calling the act a “terrorist” attack and pointing the finger at Turkey.
Tuesday’s funeral recalled another held in the same place almost exactly 10 years ago after three Kurdish activists linked to the PKK were shot dead, also in Paris’ 10th district.
The Turkish suspect in the murder, believed to have links to Ankara’s secret service, died of cancer in pre-trial detention.
Most recently, an April attack in which people were beaten with iron bars in a Kurdish cultural center in the eastern French city of Lyon was blamed on members of the Turkish ultra-nationalist Gray Wolves group, which has since been banned.
The PKK, which has been waging an armed struggle for greater rights for Turkey’s Kurdish minority for nearly four decades, is categorized as a terror group by Ankara, Europe and the United States.
Leader Ocalan is serving a life sentence on a prison island in Istanbul after being captured by Turkish agents in Kenya in 1999.
‘The fight must go on’
Often described as the world’s largest stateless people, the Kurds come from areas spread across Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, with Ankara particularly hostile to their quest for a state of their own.
“We feel they are doing everything they can to crush us, whether here or in Turkey,” said Celik, a local resident who attended the funeral and asked that his family name not be published for security reasons.
“We are here because it is our duty, it is a war our parents fought for many years and we must continue,” he told AFP.
Clashes between police and Kurdish protesters shortly after the December killings ratcheted up tensions between nominal NATO allies Turkey and France.
Ankara’s foreign ministry summoned the French ambassador to complain about “black propaganda launched by (the) PKK”.
The Kurdish Democratic Council in France (CDKF) called Tuesday’s ceremony “an opportunity for those who want to pay their last respects…
CDKF activists planned a march on Wednesday in honor of the victims of December, on the street where they were shot.
On Saturday, a “grand march” of the Kurdish community – originally planned to mark the 10th anniversary of the 2013 shooting – will depart from Paris’s Gare du Nord rail hub.